EVERETT — The reading of her name brought her family fresh tears.
Payton Beck-Glessner was shot in the chest Dec. 15 while sitting on her bed in her Everett apartment. She walked to the living room where she collapsed. She was breathing when police arrived but died a short time later at the hospital. She was 19.
Her family gathered in a Snohomish County courtroom Tuesday to watch as the young woman’s boyfriend admitted he was responsible for Beck-Glessner’s death.
A tearful Jonathan Charles Duncan pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter while armed with a gun.
Duncan faces up to 13½ years in prison when he’s sentenced later this fall. Snohomish County deputy prosecutor Francesca Yahyavi has agreed to recommend 12½ years. Duncan, 23, doesn’t have any prior felony convictions.
Tiffany Mecca, an attorney with the Snohomish County Public Defender Association, plans to argue for a sentence below the standard range. She expects to elicit testimony from a witness to help make her case for leniency.
Duncan told Everett police the shooting was an accident. Witnesses, including the couple’s roommates, said they didn’t hear any arguing before Beck-Glessner was shot.
The defendant said Beck-Glessner was sitting on the bed and he was next to her, handling the Sig Sauer. The gun discharged, he said, as he was pulling the slide back.
Duncan told police he was unfamiliar with firearms, saying it was the first time he’d handled a gun other than when he was a kid and tried using a shotgun, according to court papers.
He claimed he’d found the gun in a ditch along Rucker Avenue and brought it back to the apartment.
Detectives say the man’s online posts tell a different story. They found photographs of guns on Duncan’s social media accounts. Some of the photographs appeared to have been taken in his apartment. Witnesses also told police Duncan has experience with firearms, according to court papers.
Police investigating the shooting found the gun disassembled on a couch across the room from where Beck-Glessner had collapsed. A detective investigating the case reported, “it is extremely unlikely and unrealistic to believe that a person with no firearm experience and under tremendous stress … would be able to figure out this correct process in a matter of minutes or seconds as the defendant claimed to officers,” Yahyavi wrote in charging papers.
Beck-Glessner was a graduate of Bothell High School and attended Toni and Guy Hairdressing Academy, according to an obituary.
“She will be loved and missed always but we will remember her sincere smile and laughter, her hugs and kisses, her special bond with children, her humor, and her beauty and grace,” her family wrote.
Diana Hefley: 425-339-3463; hefley@heraldnet.com.
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